Posts Tagged ‘quotes’

Design and Photography Quotes

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Me

Some people have asked me about the quotes that appear at the top of my site. They are a collection of quotes that I have bundled together from different sources over the period of a few weeks. I find some of them very profound and close to truth and the rest are either useful or funny. So here they all are:

  • “Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.” – Unknown
  • “Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing…layout, processes, and procedures.” – Tom Peters
  • “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” – Henry David Thoreau
  • “Colour does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it.” – Pierre Bonnard
  • “Design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. It is simply an interpretation of creativity.” – Jenaiha Woods
  • “…said the blind man to the deaf dog.” – Matthew Campbell
  • “When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls.” – Ted Grant
  • “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams
  • “Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.” – Gucci family motto
  • “Light is the language of the photographer.” – Unknown
  • “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
  • “Knob on…” – Rupert Frankum
  • ” There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams
  • “No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.” – Ludwig Van Beethoven
  • “Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don’t care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.” – Tim Berners-Lee
  • “Photography is simply painting with light.” – Unknown
  • “A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.” – David Hume
  • “The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” – Auguste Rodin
  • “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – George Smith Patton
  • “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau
  • “Perhaps believing in good design is like believing in God, it makes you an optimist.” – Terence
  • “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” – Douglas Adams
  • “To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.” – Milton Glaser
  • “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
  • “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.” – John Lennon
  • “The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.” – Michael Behe
  • “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” – Bruce Feirstein
  • “Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.” – Raymond Loewy
  • “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” – Lewis Hine
  • “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.” – Ansel Adams
  • “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
  • “Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.” – Chateaubriand
  • “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” – Salvador Dali
  • “An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” – Dr Edwin Land
  • “Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture – and forget that merchandise must be sold.” – James Randolph Adams
  • “Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.” – David Hockney
  • “When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.” – Jiminy Cricket
  • “Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.” – Robert H. Schuller
  • “You don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it.” – Unknown
  • “Ah good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.” – Pablo Picasso
  • “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” – Mark Twain
  • “We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” – M. C. Escher
  • ” In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone.” – Donald Norman
  • “I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.” – John Steinbeck
  • “I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say ‘this is where I want to be…I want this look.” – Debbie Allen
  • “A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.” – Ansel Adams
  • “Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.” – Freeman Thomas
  • “Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.” – Jamie Paolinetti
  • “The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.” – W. Eugene Smith
  • “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” – George Bernard Shaw
  • “Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organising and manipulating of words and pictures.” – Jeffery Veen
  • “It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.” – James Lalropui Keivom
  • “No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” – Robert Adams
  • “Ambitious, but rubbish!” – Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear motto)
  • “In nature, light creates the colour. In the picture, colour creates the light.” – Hans Hofmann

I have more on the way, so watch this space!